When Nick Rowley is not seething silently behind wine shop counters, he sits loudly on the board of a Shakespearean theater group in—of all places—Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I note that as an incongruity because of all the things that the … Continue reading →

When Otto von Bismarck quipped, ‘The less people know about how laws and bar cherries are made, the better they sleep at night,’ he wasn’t talking about sausages. Likewise, if The Jungle had been set along the Croatian coast instead … Continue reading →

You have your Lone Rangers and you have your Rhone Rangers, and you probably have Heidelberg Tuns filled with preposterous puns, but as always, rising above them all in the rarefied atmosphere of Spring Mountain, you have Smith-Madrone. Founded in … Continue reading →

Recently, I had a dastardly disagreement with a distinguished and discerning docent, leading to a disjointed discussion about scoring en primeur wines—extremely young wines sold as futures while they are still in the barrel. The reason for our dissent … Continue reading →

I’ve been writing about wine—bulk and otherwise—for the bulk of my life—successfully and otherwise. And yeah, some things do get old. Read a random sampling of wine reviews, starting with Parker’s and trickling down to John Doh! blogger’s, and put … Continue reading →

The problem with referring to Viticoltori De Conciliis ‘Latoscuro’ as ‘The Côte-Rôtie of Campania’ is that no one but a select circle of snooty, snotty, snoring old pedants will get it. People like you and me. However, reference that silly, … Continue reading →

There comes a time in the life of every curmudgeon, no matter how mordant or cynical or jaded, when he must—if only for a moment—wax a little sappy. When confronted with a new, powerful wine created by a potent, old-school … Continue reading →